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“That got me through the illness,” she said. At the city’s English-language bookstore, she bought a copy of “ The Lord of the Rings”-whose author, J. R. R. Tolkien, whatever his differences from Austen, had a similar ability to envelop his readers in a fictional world. I’ve tried to be a writer, I cannot do it.” Then for a few weeks she came down with a mysterious illness that left her too tired to do much of anything. In a recent conversation, Clarke, who lives in a cottage in Derbyshire, England, told me, of that period, “I thought, I’m not going to do this anymore.

Clarke, who was born sixty years ago in Nottingham, began tinkering with the idea in 1992, while living in Bilbao and teaching English, having abandoned a detective novel whose plot and crime she could never quite settle on. Executed in an exquisite pastiche of the precise, ironical prose of Jane Austen, it reads less like a novel than like a slice of an ongoing history although the book is more than eight hundred pages long, it feels as if it were a mere fragment of a fully imagined reality.

The novel, set in an alternative version of England during the Regency period, describes the partnership between two magicians and how it degenerates into rivalry. Norrell,” published in 2004, is one of those. No one else can truly enter this house until the book is launched into the world, and once the work is completed the author becomes a kind of exile: the experience of living there can only be remembered.Ĭertain books, particularly novels, invite many readers to inhabit their realms over and over again, and Susanna Clarke’s début, “ Jonathan Strange & Mr. But sometimes it is a ramshackle fixer-upper that consumes time rather than cash, or a claustrophobic haunted mansion whose intractable problems nearly drive its creator mad. Often, this space feels like a sanctuary. The author, the sole inhabitant, wanders from room to room, choosing the furnishings, correcting imperfections, adding new wings. Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house.